Radio News

 When disaster strikes and power is out, news is hard to find.

Since I'm one of the few people that refuse to be tied to a mobile, my prime source of news in the first days of the aftermath was this late 1960's Hong Kong made Atlantic AM transistor radio. Radio news sure isn't what it used to be, Cleveland is a major market but what little local news I could get was little more than self-serving statements from local politicians and power company officials, which were then endlessly repeated at the top of every hour, until the next batch came out. The rest of the time being filled with endless banter about the Cleveland Browns, the other main choice was the station carrying ESPN sports talk. 375,000 thousand without power, widespread damage, and guys on the radio are yapping sports ball, just great. My main news source thus became WWJ, Detroit, all-news, great source for national news, but again we don't live in Detroit. 

Sure miss radio when I was not all that much younger. Used to listen to all the big stations at night, WCBS, WINS, WABC, WBZ, KDKA, WGN, WLS, KMOX, WLW, WWVA, WSM, to name a few, all of which provided copious amounts of news throughout the day and into the nighttime hours, a few still do.

The Missus would get news at work, which still had power and AC, and from her mobile, relaying it to me when she returned. It would have been great to know that the local community center was open for cooling and charging, we went there on Saturday, it was a great help, charged a tablet and got some real news from television websites, WEWS mostly, and caught up on NEPA via WNEP and Andy Palumbo whose blog I usually see every morning. It seems there were a lot of average people had no idea of what was going on or when power would return, the worst-case scenario was the oft repeated August 15th, there was a real sense of abandonment here. News like community centers being open, where crews were working, where an open WiFi was, or where to get a suddenly rare commodity like ice and what stores were open would have been a great service that the multi-million-dollar communications corporations could have performed, rather than what they actually delivered in a time of crisis, primarily sports news.